Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)Jones, SianEady, SandraCraig, Linda2022-12-092022-12-092022-12-23Jones, S.E., Eady, S. and Craig, L. (2022) ‘Considering social justice: Lived experiences of education students during the first course year’, Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 19(2), pp. 218–235. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/17461979221138737.https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/12659https://doi.org/10.1177/17461979221138737Siân Jones - ORCID: 0000-0002-2399-1017 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2399-1017Sandra Eady - ORCID: 0000-0002-1089-666X https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1089-666XLinda Craig - ORCID: 0000-0002-5566-7035 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5566-7035AM replaced with VoR on 2023-01-05Increasing research focus is placed on how to embed social justice within Education degrees. This paper reports findings from the first two phases of a cohort study completed just before and at the start of the pandemic, which track Scottish Education students’ reflections on social justice at one university. We used three focus groups (n = 14) and surveys to analyse students’ (n = 45) definitions of social justice. Using Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological System’s Theory and Saldana’s Analytical Coding framework we found that themes around prejudice, culture, policy, and emerging professional identity captured participants’ reflections as both beginning teachers and students of educational studies. Key to our findings was that fewer reflections of social justice were cited to global than to local contexts. This paper highlights ways in which university educators may conceive of social justice such that it is considered by students in both their immediate and in global contexts.218–235en© The Author(s) 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Social JusticeEducationInitial Teacher EducationScottish PolicyLived ExperienceArticle